FILM

HORRIFIC PHILOSOPHY

when philosophy and gore meet

By Gary Yu

Unthinking Horror

What makes a horror film successful? Well, I don’t know, but you’ve certainly got to kill people and terrify audiences about the possibility of being killed. And you can do that with sound and gory effects and creepy music; it happens all the time. But, big but, there are movies that merely scare people with the sound and gory effects, like Wrong Turn and Mom and Dad and then there are other movies that actually ask philosophical questions, like why do killers kill, and more importantly, what might we learn from watching killers kill? These movies are more daring, because they give us a point of view, a way of understanding the horror before us. In this way, they are very close to life.

Let’s take a typical horror movie. Wrong Turn is a movie about an abnormal, mentally retarded family that lives in the woods. They usually stay away from urban areas and people, but when a bunch of unlucky teenagers take a short cut or “wrong turn” to get to a camp site, the family captures them, and just for the fun of it, tries to eat them alive. Though the movie is scary, it’s also kind of funny because the characters are so sketchy that they don’t really seem to be real people or even have real emotions.

The movie begins when the main character Chris, a businessman, takes the same shortcut to get to a meeting on time. Instead, he gets a flat tire and meets the aforementioned teenagers who took the same path while camping and also got a flat tire. As you can possibly guess, all of them are hunted by the family. Chris is a heroic character and unafraid of the family even though the family is well armed – they have guns, knifes, bear traps – but Chris always comes up with “smart” ideas to confront and beat the cannibals while the teenagers keep dying.

Chris and Jessie falling in love

All the teenagers are expendable, except for Jessie, who gradually emerges as the one teenager we root for. It is amazing that when Chris and Jessie are hiding in cave, the only ones of the group still alive, Jessie cries and tells Chris that she just broke up with her boyfriend. She says that she and her friends took this trip to relax (that’s funny) and Chris comforts Jessie and they immediately fall in love despite the fact they just met and barely know each other. The relationship is so unconvincing that you don’t believe any of it. You just want to tell the director and screenwriter to quit the exposition and just start the killing. Of course love is only a plot device to keep Chris from escaping.

When he has his opportunity to run, he doesn’t take it because the family caught Jessie, who he “supposedly” loves, because the director and screenwriter tell us so. This allows for us to have one final confrontation where Chris takes revenge on the family. He wins, I guess, because he’s a good guy and good guys don’t deserve to die. Successful horror movies are full of philosophical ideas, but Wrong Turn is so stupid that it would hard to find an idea in it, anywhere.

You realize that the director isn’t interested in philosophy, but in just producing gory image after gory image. But people like it. It is the kind of movie that even if you don’t pay attention you still can guess 80 percent of the plot after watching it for ten minutes. The producers have turned Wrong Turn into a series which essentially reworks the same plot over and over again. You watch them kill and that’s that and you don’t think about it. Wrong Turn delivers the goods, but it’s not a piece of philosophy.

Evil Man, Tough Guy, Philosopher

As with Wrong Turn, Saw is also a film about a serial killer, but this killer has a philosophy of killing. Called the Jigsaw killer, John is suffering from cancer, and hates the way people get away with all their bad behavior and sins. He decides to become a type of avenging angel and creates games and traps appropriate to his victims’ sins. Different from Wrong Turn, where the killers are only driven by desire to kill and hunger, Saw presents a series of almost paradoxical questions to the audience. Do sinners deserve to live? Who has the right to kill the guilty? In reality, Saw is about the question of whether a deal penalty is appropriate for certain crimes.

For example, Amanda is a drug addict. Jigsaw brings her in to play a game where she has to wear a device, which will tear her head apart. She had to take the keys in a man’s stomach to unlock the device locked to her head. She thinks the man’s dead, but when she started cutting the man’s stomach open, the man wakes up. It turns out the man has been injected with opiates, which allows him to feel and watch but not move. This forces Amanda to kill someone by injected him with drugs in order to save her own life. It’s quite a metaphor, for Amanda and us. Amanda is grateful to Jigsaw for setting her straight. She says, “He helped me.” In the movies that follow, Amanda becomes one of the Jigsaw’s helpers and students and a huge proponent of his philosophy.

Amanda, an unwilling then willing student

And that’s the point: gore comes with philosophy.

Under the Skin is an incredibly successful movie that analyzes what it means to be human. The film is slow, still, and subtle with very few lines leaving space for the audience to think. In this case, how difficult it is to live and make good choices.

In Under the Skin is about an alien who feeds on people. She wears an attractive female disguise, lures men into her car, and then consumes them. The alien regards these men as food until a man with a deformed face gets in her car. Unlike her other victims who she knows only desire her body, this man is gentle, shy, and honest. The alien is shocked and starts to appreciate humans and spares the man.

The Alien is learning about Humans in all the worst ways

This spurs her on to experience human life. She eats, meets a man, attempts to have sex, but finds out she can’t. Eventually she bumps into a man who tries to rape her and while attacking her accidently peels off her skin. Realizing she’s not human, he burns her. That’s the end of the film. It starts with unthinking violence (the alien’s) and it ends with unthinking violence (the man’s). It’s an incredible philosophical statement about the state of nature. But that’s horror, a brutal combination of thinking and gore.

©Gary and the CCA Arts Review